Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Nothing against old people

Nothing against old people...because, after all, I are one...but let's be honest: Along with the wisdom gained from living a long time and going through some stuff, there can also be some mental drawbacks. Already this morning, I have forgiven myself for leaving a pair of shoes behind on my trip last week and have spent some time in a panic about my cell phone charger, which I found exactly where I knew it was. The way I get around a lot of the age-related absentmindedness is to work harder about being organized. I make more lists than I ever have. I make piles and place them where I can't possibly ignore them. OK, it didn't work that well to have my pile of A-priority items in the bathtub, but stuff happens, right? And everyone says that a good place to stow stuff in case of flood is in something waterproof like the dishwasher.

The stubbornness, though...well, all you have to do is read the BT blogs, also Vox, and you get an idea of how that goes. Yes, I am stubborn, and it shows up in all kinds of ways. Forget the fact that I have a lot of years of being right behind me because that only feeds the lifelong tendency that I, a Taurus, have toward digging in. Today it's only about my answering machine. After a call to Hargray about my non-functioning phones, I learned that the problem was somewhere in whatever connects to the outside phone line. I deduced that it was my answering machine and disconnected it. All was well. But the stubbornness that never gives up on anybody or anything got into me and I just had to see if I couldn't make it work. The upshot, another long stretch where people got a frustrating busy signal. I think it's curtains for the answering machine...except that it has on it the voices of my children and an adorable message from my grandson that sounds like "Tanka winka wah," (translation: "Thank you for the Lincoln Logs.") which is irreplaceable because he now speaks much more clearly.

When I see John McCain, and I hear certain things, like confusion between Sunni and Shia and the latest failure to recognize that Czechoslovakia went away a good fifteen years ago, I'm thinking that his past hero-self is, well, heroic, but that his present old-guy-self, is Sun City material.

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